ch3 · Months Later

At the center of the small home: a cot, modified for one. Once wider, she cut and re-welded it, though it still has a hinge to open back up. Just in case. But the extra space was long ago surrendered to sorted mechanical bits. The arrangement makes sense only to her, and that’s enough.

Under the covers, Vae stirs.

Inside is not warm. Just enough to make hypothermia work for it. The insulation is dense but patchworked. The walls, over-layered and sealed with scrap. The furnace is trusty but old, housed below the floorboard, below in the snow. When it kicks on, a vent in the floor exhales—just enough to fight the frost one more hour.

She doesn’t stretch. Doesn’t yawn. Just swings her legs off the cot, pulls on boots, and tightens the laces without looking. The same every morning.

Clutter lines every wall. Pegboards, makeshift cupboards, compartments, tools. Some are labeled. Some blend into others, like an invasive species. Dev’s system Vae tries to keep alive. She makes it make sense for her. The walls fend off the cold outside. The clutter fends off its relentlessness. Life support within life support.

Despite the clutter, she navigates with ease. Shoulders hunched, eyes half-lidded. A well-worn efficiency of someone who’s lived with the same ghosts for too long.

Without pause, she pops a switch on what looks like a complex component waiting to be implemented into something useful. Instead, a sequence of small lights and droid eyes flicker open. Zero is activated.

The droid, once a clunky, sparking, hover-dependent wreck, is now a floating orb of modest size. Over these months she’s refined the hover unit, added two functional arms, upgraded the optics for depth and infrared, fixed the voicebox to sound much more like Dev, eerily so. Antennae for short-range scanning, weight tolerance improved.

He looks nothing like the schematic.

That is, except for the eyes. It took her weeks. Longer, if she were honest. She told herself it was the calibration. But it was more than that. It was his resting expression. She kept adjusting it long after it worked.

Zero floats to chest height into the air and drifts across the small home, movements fluid, precise.

Zero. Too much irony in a name to pass up.

Space is tight: one sink, one shelf, one small cook unit. And the workbench, the heart of the home, the same place she built him. A soldering lamp doubles as a bedside light. Optic cables hang where wall art should be. Except for one framed photo: its subject obscured beneath a folded, spotless cloth. Him. She can’t bear to look. Can’t bring herself to take it down.

Zero checks the heat valve, levels the brew pot, wipes the counter with a cloth folded precisely in half. They don’t speak. Not yet. That’s the deal. It’s too weird. It’s not him. She knows that. Wishes she didn’t. So they operate in silence. A truce wrapped in routine, offering comfort without acknowledgement.

Vaelyn stands in front of the sink. Hands braced on either side, she stares into the drain like it might answer back. Inside, the war begins again. Regret. Dismissal. Carry on, she remembers. Resolve. She splashes water on her face. Wipes it with a cloth too small to matter. The motions are for him. She can still hear his voice. Carry on.

Her mind and memory. A marriage, equal parts love and resentment. Absent spite, she allows the union to simply continue. Nothing more. Carry on? She thinks. Fine. Lucky for you, escaping this wasted existence is demanding and dirty. So, for that, I will. At least one more day. She finishes wiping her face.

He’s no longer here, but she is. For him. That’s enough—barely. Enough to keep her moving toward a solution she pretends exists, though it refuses to take shape. Leaving is clear enough. She can picture escape a thousand different ways. What she doubts is whether she has it in her to try them all.

The brew is ready.

Vaelyn pulls out two metal cups, still. Out of habit. One she drinks. The other ends up scooping ash from the coal stove. She used to pass the second to him, across their makeshift breakfast table. A memory. No longer part of the routine.

One table leg is too short, but fixing it would be a change made without him.

She puts on her coat. The same one every day, mended and reinforced. Gloves next, scarred from working outside. Next and always, she picks up the tin, small, light. Inside, his lock of hair. She doesn’t open it. Doesn’t need to. It goes in the inside pocket. Easy to feel it against her ribs. Ever since that fateful day it has stayed within reach.

Vae’s small home stands on stilts. Old pipes, actually, groaning from the weight of its heavy, welded foundation, if a house could groan by looks alone. Iron footings plunge down through the softer snow and rest on firn; the stage between fallen snow and compacted glacial ice. The front steps disappear permanently into the same drifts. The whole structure looks half-swallowed by frozen, colorless waves, moving slowly along with the wind.

One of the older pipes no longer rests on a solid base. It creaks much like the shorter leg of the table. She just avoids that spot.

From a distance, her home could be mistaken for a weather station or a derelict relay post. Only up close are there signs that a life resides here.

Two lives, once.

If a house could mourn by looks alone. A dented kettle hangs off the siding. A soot ring around the chimney pipe. A tarp flaps against one corner like a loose thought. All reminders of a stubborn domesticity—a kind of fragile hope that hasn’t yet admitted defeat.

Parked beside the stilted home, and just as large, is the hauler. Treasured for more than just keeping safe his lock of hair. They fixed it up together. Cobbled repairs from abandoned scrap. A patchwork of salvage and black-market components. It looks like a shipping crate with a cab fitted at one end. Huge wheels in front and massive snow tracks in back. Rusted, oversized, and welded armor over the original panels. Her best guess is twenty-third century technology with sparse twenty-fourth century upgrades. But it still runs. Still.

Over these eighteen months, it’s become more than a means of transportation. Her welding is cleaner, more precise. Fresh hydraulic connections traverse its underbelly, optimized power cables, and a new suspension.The shape is the same, but its purpose is more now. Autonomous systems with manual overrides. Safety redundancies, spaced out and segmented. Self-contained protocols and a new operating system. It’s neither new nor unfamiliar. Something she doesn’t yet want to name. She’s making it ready. For what, she doesn’t know, which makes it easy to ignore.

Vae gives Zero a nod. Time to go. Lights on his chassis blink. Lights in the hauler’s cab flicker on.

Zero floats ahead to start the power-up sequence. He activates the exterior relay and swings open the driver’s side hatch. Vae turns the furnace down. No lights in the home need turning off. She knows the layout blind. Knows she’s leaving. What’s the point?

The hauler’s interior groans with the effort of waking. Dials blink. Vents cough up warm air. Power-up complete. Zero waits. She climbs up and straps herself into the captain’s seat. They used to play-fight to sit in it. Zero locks a hand to the other chair’s armrest, within arm’s reach of the console’s controls.

Still, they don’t talk.

Outside the windscreen, the wind had softened to a whisper. Snow dunes stretch nearly across the entire horizon. Except for a faint cliff range. Beyond that, her destination. A more faint skyline of The Reach. The only destination that allows her to find a way.

She grips the wheel and sighs. Then hits the ignition switch.

The hauler growls to life. Then lurches forward. Treads churn the snow. The rig whines but doesn’t stall. They soon pass a rare derelict structure, beyond repair. Most of her home was built from its salvage. They drive on for a long stretch. The hauler’s treads chew steadily through the pale blue drifts. A slow, lumbering plod across pale blue dunes and not much else, into the silence.

The day begins.

She doesn’t do it on purpose, but shortly after the small home recedes beneath the horizon, Vae allows herself to open up. With the obligation of her home’s life support out of sight and the city that killed him still far enough away, she is free to wonder. Not yet hope. But it’s a step.

Chapter 4: Morning Commute →

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